‘Look, I know I said some unforgivable things. I’ll be a perfect gentleman this time. Promise.’ She managed a brave smile. ‘Perfect, except in the crucial department,’ he added bitterly.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it fucking matters. If you’re selling your immortal soul for sex you need a lover who can at least get it up.’
‘But you can,’ she pointed out. It’s a matter of keeping it there.
‘Don’t you laugh at me!’ His eyes were wild in his pale face.
‘Well, maybe if you laughed at yourself sometimes,’ she pleaded.
‘Hah!’ He sat scowling and biting his lips. Annie gazed out at a neat square of pine forest on a distant hill. It’s not funny. How was she to encourage him without being patronizing?
‘It’s just so fucking humiliating,’ he muttered at last.
‘For me, too,’ she protested. ‘Not being arousing enough to . . . um . . .’
‘Are you kidding? That was half the problem. I felt totally outclassed. Shit, I hardly have to look at you and you come.’
‘It must be your penetrating stare. I mean,’ she hurried on, remembering it wasn’t funny, ‘it’s you, not me. I’m not like it with anyone else. I’m just the instrument, remember?’
She saw an awakening flicker of lust in his eyes. He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, his hand lingering on her cheek, thumb brushing her mouth. She gasped his name and he slid his thumb suddenly between her parted lips. Libby shot clean out of her basket as though electrocuted.
‘God, you’re wanton,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back.’ He started the car.
Before long they were approaching Bishopside. Annie caught herself in the act of praying that it would be all right and felt a jolt of guilty fear.
Candlelight gleamed on the taps in the dim bathroom. Annie lay back against Will’s chest, the water lapping at her chin. She took another sip of champagne and held it in her mouth. The bubbles burst against her palate like a tiny round of applause. I’ve gone to the dogs, she thought drunkenly. The libby-dibby dogs. Her body was still throbbing from his lovemaking. He had begun tentatively enough – a swift scale, a few arpeggios – until he mastered his stage fright. He’d worked up at last to a ruthless virtuosic cadenza, sobbing and laughing with relief in her arms as the last strains died away. And now those musician’s fingers were at work again, intent on wringing one more agonized crescendo from her.
‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘Will, I can’t stand it. You’re insatiable.’
He chuckled. ‘Just born again.’
Ah, the benefits of a little gynaecological know-how. A man who wouldn’t joggle her around as though she had a loose connection, or jiggle her like a bathroom door, implying, Are you going to be much longer in there? I’m getting desperate! The champagne was roaring in her head. Here it comes, she thought. Rumbling drums, mounting strings, tearing brass . . . Then the blinding white crash! of cymbals. Fffffortissimo!
The water subsided into calm. Libby lay poleaxed.
‘I’m tingling,’ murmured Annie.
‘You were hyperventilating.’
She saw that medical expertise had its down side. ‘You lied,’ she accused him. ‘You told Hayley and Lisa you had to work tonight.’
‘Excuse me – I’ve worked bloody hard.’
‘True.’ She giggled. ‘It’s nice to be played by such a maestro.’
‘Why, thank you, honey. Nice to get my hands on a Stradivarius.’
He raised his glass. ‘A toast to my newly recovered manhood. God, it’s been years, I can’t tell you.’ Their glasses clinked, they drank, then he turned her lips to his and drooled a cold trickle of champagne into her mouth. His fingers were at her breasts plucking idle chords. Libby quivered afresh. Not more!
‘What nice shiny taps you have,’ she remarked in desperation.
‘That’s Ethel for you.’
‘You employ a cleaning lady? Is she a treasure?’
‘Yes. Dusts the skirting-board under the radiator. Cleans the light switches. Even irons my underpants.’
‘Ethel’s a sick woman.’
He laughed. ‘I’m Ethel. I have a multiple personality disorder.’
‘Who else have you got in there?’
‘You’ve met the mad wolf-man.’ He let out a bloodcurdling howl. ‘Tamed but not domesticated by the love of a good woman. And there seems to be an Italian Calvinist with a death-wish. Very confusing. What about you?’
‘Oh, Miss Brown the schoolmarm. She’s the snotty one.’
‘And someone who gave me a look of stark naked slavering lust the first evening I met you.’
‘Oh!’ She blushed. ‘Libby.’
When she explained he threw his head back and laughed. ‘Here, girl!’ he called, clicking his fingers and whistling. ‘Walkies!’
‘No. Honestly, Will, I’m exhausted.’
‘Hang on to those taps, Miss Brown. It’s the mad wolf-man.’
He was asleep. She could hear his soft breathing beside her. The bedroom was dark apart from the faint orange glare of city lights, which shone through the crack in the curtains and fanned out across the ceiling. She listened to the night noises. The last drunken voices had gone. A helicopter hovered overhead. Wind scoured the streets. A gate banged once, twice. She could hear a siren tearing along a distant road, and far off, almost swallowed up in the night, an alarm bell was ringing on and on. She stretched out a leg cautiously in his cool sheets, hoping her restlessness wouldn’t wake him. Her body was still aching and pulsing. She thought of the princess who could feel the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. ‘I don’t know what it was in the bed,’ the poor princess cried, ‘but I’m black and blue all over!’ How could he just roll away and sleep like a baby? After all that. She clenched in a sudden shudder. Her feelings bordered on disgust. Had he run through his entire repertoire? What if he’d merely dished up the hors d’oeuvres, and some vast unimaginable plat du jour still lay waiting for her, quivering in aspic in the sexual pantry?
She was feeling thirsty and thought of creeping to the bathroom and slurping from the tap. The taps! She saw herself on her knees clinging to them, wailing, as frantic tidal waves swamped the candles. No, she couldn’t face the bathroom. Besides, she knew he was above the vulgar practice of drinking tap water.
In the end she decided to creep down to the fridge. She tiptoed naked along the dark hall and opened the kitchen door. Instantly the night was shattered by a howling siren. She shut the door in panic, but the howling continued. Will came pounding down the stairs.
‘Sorry!’ she cried, over the noise. He pressed some buttons and the alarm cut off in mid-howl. ‘I was just getting a drink,’ she bleated in the silence.
‘You should’ve asked.’
‘I didn’t realize it was on. I didn’t want to wake you.’
He chuckled in the dark. ‘Silly cunt. Get back to bed.’
She felt a stinging slap and fled back upstairs, her pride and backside smarting. He followed her a couple of minutes later with a bottle of mineral water.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Forgot to warn you.’
He poured her some water and explained briefly how the system worked. The glass clattered against her teeth. They lay down again and he turned the light off. She listened for his quiet breathing. Would he fall straight back to sleep? Perhaps doctors could do that after those grim houseman months. She was still jittery from shock. The helicopter throbbed in the distance. I feel so lonely, she thought. All kinds of terrifying intimacy, yet I daren’t reach out and hold his hand. A tear crept down her cheek. He hit me. He called me a cunt. She lay rigid in case a sniff betrayed her, not wanting to become a demanding accusing woman. Her throat ached from holding back her sobs.
De-dum de-dum. De-dum de-dum. The express sped south. Annie watched the countryside slip past. Fields of winter wheat, hawthorn hedges hazed over with green, chestnut and beech speckled with unfurling leaves, pale clumps
of primroses. The landscape was charged with spring. No more holding back, it seemed to say. Buds will burst, shoots will spear up from the earth, song must and will pour out of every throat. She quivered with the force of it, barely able to keep in her seat. All this is God, a voice was murmuring. If you glory in the creation what are you doing but praising the Creator? The voice of the serpent: Eat, eat. You will not die.
Why didn’t she feel guilty? Was it because she hadn’t grasped the enormity of what she had done? Or because guilt must lead to repentance and amendment of life and she wasn’t ready for that yet? She’d woken sick with shame that morning, as though suffering from a sexual hangover. The hair of the dog – or wolf, possibly – had worked wonders. She’d been expecting to sober up on the train, but after two hours here she was as tipsy as ever. Libby had never looked sleeker. Annie shivered at the memory of Will’s face between her thighs, his warm mouth, the shock of tasting herself on his lips . . . How-oo-owl! She felt as though someone were feeding her insides slowly through an old-fashioned mangle. Hadn’t one of the saints been martyred like that – intestines wound out on a windlass? Her stomach plunged again. It struck her that lust was barely distinguishable from dread. And only a hair’s breadth away from disgust. Could she really have done those things and enjoyed them? The train flashed through a wood thick with celandines. She gasped. The sun might almost have fallen and spilled out along the ground, the flowers were so bright.
The trouble with sudden passion, she thought, is that it’s blinding. It plunges your lover into close-up before your eyes have a chance to focus. Will was a baffling puzzle of light and dark that she felt she would never solve. Touchy, bad-tempered, sexy, honest, funny, crude, kind, ruthless. The bits never seemed to fit together. They tumbled over one another like shapes in a kaleidoscope, worrying her with new patterns all the time. That morning had been a good example.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she had asked as the car turned off the AI.
‘To the biggest Marks and Spencer’s in the known universe.’ He saw the sudden look of foreboding on her face. ‘That’s right. It’s the night of the long knives for your knicker drawer, Miss Brown.’
‘No! I couldn’t possibly let you.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d feel . . . humiliated.’
‘Why?’ He parked the car. ‘It’s a gift, not a payment. Wake up, Annie. I’m your lover. Lovers do this kind of thing.’
‘But –’
‘God, you’re so ungrateful! If you don’t get out of this car pretty damn quick I’ll go and choose it all myself. Want to risk that?’
She trotted after him protesting until he stopped and caught her hands in his and kissed them.
‘Come on. Don’t be mean, Annie. Please let me. I’ve got no one else to spend my money on.’
She wasn’t proof against such shameless wheedling, and her holdall was now bulging with new underwear. Whatever will Mother think when she goes snooping through my things?
‘Well, I hope you’re not going to overhaul the rest of my wardrobe,’ Annie had muttered, as the assistant was folding the knickers and bras.
‘You mean you hope I am?’ asked Will. ‘Why? Seen something you want?’
‘I mean,’ said Annie flushing, ‘exactly what I say.’
‘Like fuck you do.’
The assistant started a little. She was holding out her hand for his chargecard, which he was tapping angrily on the cash desk.
‘I have to decode all this tight-arsed tact and politeness to get at what you really want.’
Annie made no reply, fearing he was quite equal to a stand-up row in the lingerie department. Ungrateful, causing a silly fuss about nothing, suggested her mother’s voice.
Will paid and handed her the carrier bag.
‘Thank you.’
But he wasn’t placated. She hurried to keep up with him, clutching the bag in sweaty hands. They got into the car and drove off. After a couple of miles he broke the silence. ‘At the risk of humiliating you further, can I take you out for lunch?’
She flinched at his sarcasm, but found the courage to say, ‘Um . . . can I buy lunch?’
‘No. Stop being so fucking difficult. You’re on a student grant, for Christ’s sake. My income’s ten times yours.’
She blinked rapidly. Please don’t start crying, she pleaded with herself. He’ll think you’re just resorting to the classic female weapon. The car turned off the main road, and before long they were out on the moors. She tried to think of something to say in case he interpreted her silence as sulking.
‘Will . . .’
‘Shut up, Annie.’
What am I going to do, she wondered in despair. Isabella would wind down the window and strew the new underwear across County Durham if a man treated her like this. ‘That’s what I think of you and your sodding money!’ Annie pictured a flock of knickers whirling off like racing pigeons.
Without warning Will pulled over and got out of the car. She watched him stride angrily across the dead heather, then fling his arms wide at the sky in a cosmic Why? This must be the Italian Calvinist, thought Annie. His gestures seemed to have the right mixture of ferocious repression and Latin flair. She got out of the car and approached him cautiously, trying to keep the smile off her face. He rounded on her, demanding, ‘Why am I doing this? Christ, can’t I relate normally to a woman for once? Look, Annie, I know you’re not a scheming bitch. I don’t mean to treat you like one.’
‘I’m sorry if I seemed ungrateful,’ she ventured.
‘Stop fucking apologizing!’ he raged. She closed her lips tightly to stop another ‘sorry’ escaping. ‘Jesus, do you have any idea how provocative your meekness is?’ There was a pause. ‘I don’t believe this. You’re laughing at me.’
‘Only very gently.’ She gazed up into his stormy eyes and after a moment was rewarded with a smile.
‘Libby! Here, girl!’
‘No!’ She turned to run, shrieking as he felled her with a rugby tackle. ‘Don’t! Someone might come.’
‘Both of us, I hope.’
He’s like a mad March day, thought Annie, leaning her head against the headrest. She could almost feel the springy heather under her back and his deep hungry kisses. Sunshine and cloud chasing one another, wild winds, freak hailstorms. More lovely than a summer day, though far less temperate.
My word, Barney and Isabella were in for a scorching honeymoon. Annie had been wondering how to warm up the unappetizing memory of her couplings with Graham and pass it off is a banquet.
The summer vacation ended and Isabella returned to Cambridge. She started attending the church Barney had recommended. It was full of galumphing evangelicals, but she persisted nobly. He came to visit her every other week, but never repeated those passionate kisses she’d enjoyed at the farm. He held her hand and took her out for pub lunches, which were all right in their way, of course, but they were not candlelit meals in exclusive restaurants. Perhaps he had no money, Isabella reminded herself. She didn’t know what a curate’s stipend was, but the glimpse she’d had of his house in September suggested that there wasn’t much left over for interior design.
The awfulness of his sitting room haunted her. Was she seriously considering spending the rest of her life with a man who owned a secondhand plastic sofa, which farted sighingly like a whoopee cushion on Valium every time you sat on it? And the orange and brown carpet with its pattern of exploding cabbages – had it come with the house, or did it reflect Barney’s taste? To say nothing of the blown vinyl. Still, you could always regard it as a challenge. Amazing things could be done with a pot of paint and a really nice kelim.
Christmas drew near. Isabella’s spirits rose at the thought of all those festive parties. Barney, however, could not be persuaded to escort her to a single one of them. No. Sir was too busy in his bloody parish. All right, so it was the silly season in the Church, but all the same. Surely he had one free evening between now and Christmas?
Isabella had
reached the ‘Well, sod you, Vicar’ frame of mind when Camilla called round to tempt her to yet another party. Isabella threw on a little black number and went.
When she woke the next morning her ceiling looked odd. After a moment it dawned on her what was wrong with it. It was not her ceiling. It was not her bed, either. Oh, God – I haven’t, have I? Someone grunted and wallowed beside her. Oh, God – I have!
She sat up and stared aghast at the dark head on the pillow. Her instinct was to leap out of bed and bathe and scrub and scream and cry until she’d washed it all away and made it never happen. Her head throbbed. Barney. Oh, God, Barney I’m so sorry! Tears oozed out under her gritty eyelids. I didn’t even enjoy it. She had a dim recollection of lying limply and saying, ‘Go away. I hate you. I want Barney,’ and of – what was his name? – climbing good-naturedly aboard and rogering her anyway.
She got out of bed and searched for her clothes. He was stirring. When his face emerged at last from the pillow she recognized him. Luke. The dark smutty one she’d gone to the May ball with. At least it wasn’t a complete stranger – as if that made things any better.
‘You going?’ he mumbled as she struggled into her dress.
‘Yes.’
He groped for a cigarette and lit it. ‘Who the fuck’s Barney?’
‘My boyfriend,’ she muttered.
Luke cackled. ‘The dickless parson, right?’
‘He’s got a bigger one than you have!’ shouted Isabella.
Luke blew a smug little smoke ring. He was still smirking as she slammed the door and stumbled out into the foggy morning.
Back in her own college she stood under the shower and bawled. There was no washing this one away. How could she have been so stupid? She’d let Barney down appallingly. And herself. And God. Whatever must he be thinking?
She dressed and hurried round to the chaplain and blurted out the whole miserable tale. Tim assured her of God’s forgiveness. She couldn’t help noticing he was less sanguine about Barney’s generosity.
‘Isabella, you really must tell him,’ he urged.
‘I daren’t,’ she said. ‘He’ll bloody murder me!’
The Benefits of Passion Page 18
